If your business is having a hard time getting customers through the door, check out Google Places, Yahoo Listings and, if you are in Florida, WOMbeat. These may be the answers you need to help grow your business.

Previously known as the Local Business Center, Google Places is a way to better connect Internet search users to local businesses and to give them more informed decisions about where to go and what business or product they should be using. Google Place Pages allows people to connect to information from the best sources across the Internet, giving reviews and essential facts, as well as real-time updates and offers from business owners. These Places also allow businesses to share their information such as hours of operation, phone number, links, description, tag line and much more. This provides business owners with effective, yet easy to use, tools.

Yahoo! Local Listings is an online Advertising tool for business owners. It gives owners the ability to provide details about their business to potential and existing customers. Yahoo! Local allows owners to upload any information about their business from their computer and is very easy to manage. When setting up your listing, you won’t have to worry about using specific key words for your business nor will you have to manage bids.

WOMbeat! is a simple way to collect all of your biggest customers in one place online. WOMbeat! uses word of month effectively and efficiently by using customer incentives and metrics. It is an easy way for your customers to recommend you to their friends and allows you to build more customer loyalty. Click here to get started with your free business listing.

Download my PDF outline for step-by-step instructions on how to set up your Google Places and Yahoo Listings.

Need more ways to grow your business? Visit the Oddpodz book store and see our SEO and social media Ta-Do lists. These under $10.00 ebooks provide proven and valuable insight on two hot marketing topics.

www.feedbooks.com/

Feedbooks is a universal e-reading platform compatible with all your mobile devices—it can work with your Kindle, iPhone, iPod, or PDA.  Feedbooks’ name derives from RSS feeds, but also means a “hunger for books.”  For online and portable reading, Feedbooks is the place to start.  Another great feature Feedbooks offers is that you can convert any RSS feed into a PDF or Mobipocket file that you can transfer to your portable reading device, save on your hard drive, or print out to read later.  With Feedbooks huge library of free eBooks, you can download an entire library’s worth of writings, holding it in the palm of your hand.

Cost: FREE

Oddpodz Review: Feedbooks boasts a huge library of free downloadable eBooks in a high quality format.   There are thousands of public domain and creative commons works, made easy to find by Feedbooks’ guide and search functions—or you can just browse my most popular, most recent, author or subject.  But the RSS to PDF tool is what’s really great here, as you can now take many of your favorite blogs with you or read them offline.

1) FREE Books delivered to your email.
dailylit.com, over 1,000 books, for many titles the entire book is FREE, others provide generous sample chapters.

DailyLit was created because the founders spent hours each day on email, but couldn’t find the time to read a book. Sound familiar? Now great books come by email and they are FREE. It’s simple.
1. Find a book you want to read
2. Enter your email address
3. Click subscribe

DailyLit has many other features. Some require creating a profile.
* Follow a group reading the same book together, on Twitter (and RSS).
* Take part in the discussion forums.
* Give ratings and reviews.
* Manage BookLists.
* Give DailyLit books as gifts.

Read the rest of this entry »

www.scribd.com/

Scribd began with the observation – “that there’s a writer in all of us.” Scribd is a social publishing site, the YouTube for document sharing.  It provides a central storage place for others to publish and discuss original writings and documents.  Scribd uses it own document reader, making it simple for anyone to access documents without downloads or compatibility issues.  Here you’ll find not only free eBooks, but much more as well—Scribd is a platform for many types of writings—from class syllabuses to sheet music to brochures to novel-length works of fiction. With Scribd groups, you can share documents within your circle of friends, your organization, or your online network.  Documents can be made private and secure, or shared with the world.

Cost: FREE

Oddpodz Review: There are a lot of uses for Scribd—as it’s an innovative new platform for reading.  Maybe you have the first chapter of a novel you want to put out there to gauge a response; maybe there’s an old college essay on your hard drive that you want to share; it can help you run your business by liberating your hard drive and helping you organize your documents with tags and categories.

goreadgreen.com

The Read Green Initiative is asking you to make the switch from glossy magazines to eMagazines, and they’ll give a free 1 Year online subscription to a magazine of your choice.  Choose from hundreds of well-respected publications, including Reader’s Digest, US News, and Popular Science among them. Cost: FREE

Oddpodz Review: Going green saves you some green when you get your favorite publication for free.

Project Gutenberg

Get access to more than 2 million books—most of them free—in a few clicks.

www.gutenberg.org

www.tradepub.com

This website offers free business, computers, engineering and trade magazines, white papers, downloads and podcasts.

You have the opportunity to apply for free subscriptions to magazines such as Oracle, Website Magazine or Global Finance. The magazine publisher determines qualification and reserves the right to limit the number of free subscriptions.

That’s an interesting mix of subjects that should resonate with most of our readers. I must admit, I’m starting to really enjoy this blogging thing. Sharing what I know and what I believe with a bunch of creative-minded biz friends is fun and challenging.

Blogging.
As I sit down at my keyboard tonight and begin to write this week’s posts I ponder about some things.

1) Should this blog and Oddpodz for that matter be more narrowly focused, our content, tools and offerings?
Today, we strive to give creative-minded business people and organizations, from a 1 person solo practice to a 500-person enterprise, good ideas, free tools and a network to find and connect with other valuable resources and people.

Is diversity a good thing? Or is a more laser-like target better? Please tell us what you think.

2) What does it take to build a power blog?
In general terms, we know it’s about good content, ongoing SEO efforts and participating in other high traffic communities and blogs. But what are the top 10 most powerful actions a blogger can do to significantly move the reader meter.

I’m going to post both of these questions in our forum and invite you to add your feedback. I’ve been using my Linkedin groups quite a bit to have discussions on a bunch of issues. I’ll be compiling these soon and sharing them with in Oddpodz.

Headlines.
It was my intention to next blog about my friend Dan Schawbel’s new book Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success

Me 2.0 teaches people how to use social media tools for personal brand building and is the first book of this kind written for the millennials generation. I suppose us older folks can also learn from this book, since we often act like we are 30 something. The book is great and I will be posting a review in the book review section in the Oddpodz forum and will dedicate our Tues. blog to some of the book’s highlights and the topic of personal branding.

Sorry, I got side tracked.
As I was crafting my blog title on personal branding, I discovered a very cool, free tool that analyzes headlines for its emotion marketing impact. As you know, reaching your customers in a deep and emotional way is a key to successful copywriting, and your headline is unquestionably the most important piece of copy you use to reach prospects.

The Advanced Marketing Institute provides the free headline analysis tool.
The Advanced Marketing Institute is a group of researchers, educators, and developers who have come together to provide real tools and knowledge to businesses and individuals who are tired of struggling to control their chaotic systems.

How does the Headline Analyzer work?
Simple go to: Headline Analyzer

Type in your headline. It must be under 20 words. Hit analyze this.
Your headline will be analyzed and scored based on the total number of Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) words it has in relation to the total number of words it contains. This will determine the EMV score of your headline. In addition to the EMV score, You will find out which emotion inside your customer’s your headline most impacts:

Intellectual
Words which are especially effective when offering products and services that require reasoning or careful evaluation.

Empathetic
Words which resonate in with Empathetic impact often bring out profound and strong positive emotional reactions in people.

Spiritual
Words which are especially effective when offering products and services that require reasoning or careful evaluation. Words which resonate in with Empathetic impact often bring out profound and strong positive emotional reactions in people. Words which have the strongest potential for influence and often appeal to people at a very deep emotional level.

So I tested out a few headlines. There is no limit to how many headlines you can get feedback on.

Remember this title is for a blog post for Dan Schawbel’s new book,and other personal branding insight.

My first headline: Be a business magnet Project Authority Earn trust Win Contracts
My Headline’s EMV Score: 40%

My 2nd headline: How to be a business magnet, project authority, earn trust and win contracts today
My Headline’s EMV Score: 42.86%

My 3rd headline: Stop losing opportunities. Be your strongest business magnet, exude authority, earn trust and win more clients today My Headline’s EMV Score: 52.94%

This score indicates that my headline has a total of 52.94% Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) Words. To put that in perspective, the English language contains approximately 20% EMV words. And for comparison, most professional copywriters’ headlines will have 30%-40% EMV Words in their headlines, while the most gifted copywriters will have 50%-75% EMV words in headlines.

Yahoo, I’m gifted! For at least a few minutes.
This is a cool tool and gets you really thinking about how to write more emotionally charged copy. But for a blog title, it also has me thinking search engine results. So my recommendation is: Headlines should be short and include keywords, use the highest rated title as a subtitle.

In closing, what does constipation have to do with any of this?
Well for starters, brilliant comedians have been leveraging this writing technique for years. It’s called a triple. Two words are normal, expected and could go together. The last word is goofy, unexpected and some times shocking. Which makes the choice and combination of these three words so effective in getting attention and hopefully a laugh. You can use this method when you are speaking or writing.

Last week I talked about dealing with creative brain freeze, which could also be described as creative constipation. This week I’ve been jamming, pumping out ideas and enjoying my favorite things, writing, thinking and problem solving. If my thawing your brain tips and the ebook on creative productive we recommended didn’t help, start reading Mark McGuinness’ blog, it’s amazing! Or, eat more fiber.